Tag: poem

The tagline on this blog describes it as “(mostly) first person poetry, prose & opinion” but in reality the main topic seems to be a repeated complaint that I don’t know what to write about. I think the secondary topic is probably another complaint – that I’m too busy to write very much.

Wondering what to write – and, indeed, wondering whether I actually would manage to get whatever I wrote posted as the phone company have let me down – I remembered the “Thing That Must Not Happen” as described in Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise:

Now, when you see in a newspaper a blank white space, bearing the legend: “THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR SO-AND-SO LTD.,” it may mean nothing very much to you, but to those who know anything of the working of advertising agencies, those words carry the ultimate, ignominious brand of incompetency and failure. So-and-so’s agents have fallen down on their job; nothing can be alleged in mitigation. It is the Thing That Must Not Happen.

Although all the images in this post have something in common, I’m not sure that they are, strictly speaking, variations on a theme. That, I think, would imply that the theme had been chosen and the photos taken to illustrate it.

What really happened was that I was looking through the mass of photos I have taken recently trying to find connections: it was a post hoc selection, not premeditated.Continue reading “on a theme”

After all, if I’d been in a hurry, I wouldn’t have been paying attention to the bits and bobs of rubbish strewn across the pavement; it was only because I was dawdling that I noticed these doodles formed by a couple of rubber bands I suspect were dropped by the postman.Continue reading “just doodling”

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post inspired by the words “poems are hard”, which appeared on a local pub chalkboard. It’s not just the poems themselves that are hard, though: it’s even hard to get people to agree on what poetry is.

Some people think that poetry should deal with the big issues of Life, Love and Death, others that it should be all kittens and flowers, sweetness and light; some think it should make us look at familiar things and occurrences as if they were new; others that it should make the personal universal; some think it should have structure and be carefully crafted, others that it should rhyme, others that it should be written “from the heart” and therefore anything goes.Continue reading “not nice”

Wondering what to write to accompany yet another photograph of flowers, I searched through the blog for the word “rose”. The search also picked up words where “rose” is a substring – rosemary, primrose, arose and prose.

By chance, then, I came upon a post from 2012 called poetry, prose and politics, which contains the quotation from Mario Cuomo, former governor of the state of New York: